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The Gramene team is happy to announce the release of our 32nd build. This release includes the first inclusion of the moss Physcomitrella patens in our Ensembl genome browser which itself is running on the latest version 60. Also new are the chromosome 3 short arms of Oryza nivara and O. rufipogon.

Gramene is happy to announce the publication of an update on the site in Nucleic Acids Research. This is an open-access article, so please see the publisher's website for the full text.

Gramene is happy to offer a new data set in our BioMart for variation data. This is a mirror of the data at Ensembl Plants and holds SNPs from Oryza sativa indica, O. sativa japonica, Vitis vinifera, and Arabidopsis thaliana.

For over a year, the Tassel software has been undergoing major design improvements leading to the release of version 3.0 as the best recommended version to use. Tassel version 2.1 is still available via the web site for anyone preferring that version.

Gramene's Ensembl genome browser is a powerful tool that has many options, and their development team has done an excellent job creating many useful video and PDF tutorials that we encourage our users to explore.

The Gramene team recently discovered a bug in our SNP Query tool that returned incorrect allele values for a given genomic range. We have fixed this tool and regret any errors it may have introduced into our users' downstream analysis.

A draft genome sequence of the Castor bean (Ricinus communis) was published on 22 August 2010 in the journal Nature Biotechnology. Besides many features, they discovered that many of the genes involved in oil synthesis are single copy genes.

Did you know that the International Rice Research Institute has a Flickr account where you can find lots of fantastic photos of rice and their work?

An international team of researchers published the Apple (Malus × domestica Borkh.) genome in the Journal Nature Genetics on August 29, 2010. (Velasco et al 2010). This is the first report of a plant genome sequencing from a member of the Rosaceae taxonomic family. The genome putatively contains about 57,000 genes.

Members of the Gramene team will be present at the Genome Informatics meeting next week in Hinxton, UK. We will be presenting several posters related to Gramene, the Maize Sequence website, and classifying and visualizing genome wide association study data in the Arabidopsis 2010 project.